The work we’re given to do

Life is full of surprises. Like going to work one day and being told your services are no longer required.

Most of us prefer a little more predictability in our affairs. We even come to demand that events follow a prescribed course, and when things stray from the script, we become angry and frustrated.

As British writer Samuel Butler was quoted as saying in the nineteenth century: “Life is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument.” Much more recently, American author Saul Bellow likened it to “concertizing and practicing scales at the same time.”

Our feelings may get the better of us. Neil Anderson says we are responsible for our thinking and our beliefs.

“You are not shaped as much by your environment as you are by your perception of your environment,” he wrote in Victory over the Darkness. “If what you believe does not reflect truth, then what you feel does not reflect reality. . . . Remember: Your emotions are a product of how you perceived the event, not the event itself.”

What if you chose to perceive your joblessness as an opportunity for character building? Child psychologists talk about maturity in terms of “frustration tolerance” in everyday life. When I measure myself by that gauge, I shudder.

Ornithologists tell of the value of struggle in the birth of a bird. If the egg is punctured to “help” along the process, the hatchling is less likely to survive, failing to develop the requisite strength through the struggle of the birth process. The suggestion is not just that adversity and struggle are a normal part of life, but that they may be essential to life.

I recognize that this is not a  popular view today, but I believe it’s an important perspective for those wounded in the economic theater.

Speaker and author Tim Hansel described this perspective well in his book, You Gotta Keep Dancin’:

The big dream in our society is that if we work hard enough, we will eventually be able to experience a life without limitations or difficulties. It is also one of the biggest sources of friction in our society, creating disappointment, unnecessary suffering, and missed opportunities to live a full life. Some people spend their entire life waiting for that which will never, and can never, happen. . . . One of the greatest  tragedies of our modern civilization is that you and I can live a trivial life and get away with it. One of the great advantages of pain and suffering is that it forces us to break through our superficial crusts to discover life on a deeper and more meaningful level.

Another advantage of disadvantages is that we have the opportunity to be transformed by our suffering. Here is a question worth pondering: When it comes right down to it, is there any such thing as true earthly security? I think not. And I believe the reason is to turn our hearts toward eternal things. To quote the world’s greatest Teacher:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:19–21).

What are treasures in heaven? In work/life terms, I would  suggest they include Bolles’s triad of finding God, making the world a better place, and exercising your gift in your life mission.

I would also suggest they specifically do not include the accumulation of personal possessions and investing oneself in the climbing of career ladders, especially to the exclusion of family and other human relationships.

Robert Bolles has written eloquently about depression and its emotional and spiritual sources—stored-up anger and a sense of abandonment. There’s also a mental source, he says—meaninglessness.

In The Three Boxes of Life, he tells of a study of surgical patients who found meaning to be the single biggest factor in successful post-operative recovery. The more the patient believed that there was no such thing as a meaningless experience, the faster the patient healed. Thus, spiritual survival seems to require that there be some meaning to everything that happens, even if that meaning is not evident to us at the time that we are going through the experience.

I am suggesting that in our adversity this meaning is best found in the context of our personal, earthly mission and in our ultimate, eternal mission. In Redeemed Ambition, Ralp hMattson wrote: “If you want to know my will, you will have to come into personal contact with me. If you want to know God’s will, you will have to come into personal contact with Him.”11 This may be that opportunity. Don’t let it pass you by.

And when those feelings of worthlessness come, remember that the King of Glory was sold for the price of a slave. In the words of James Smith:

The man is always prosperous who succeeds in doing the will of God. Sold for thirty pieces of silver, yet the pleasure of the Lord prospered in His hand. It does not matter what low value the world may set upon the servant of God, he will be a prosperous man in God’s sight if he pleases him.12 Remember, too, what the Lord Jesus said on the night He was betrayed: “I have finished the work Thou gavest Me to do” (John 17:4 KJV).

Smith asks the question for all of us: “If He should ask you on that day, ‘What was your occupation?’ As a Christian what would you answer?”

That is, have we done the work He has given us to do? Do we even know what that is? If not, what are we doing about it? Have we been occupied with those things or pre-occupied with the things of this world? What is our occupation?

Scripture repeatedly exhorts us to live unto eternity. That would seem to call for some reverse engineering, setting our sights on the end in order to plot our steps in the present. Can we not ask the Lord to give us the vision we need to see the way? Can we

What will be our life-work legacy? Will we be able to say, as the Lord Jesus said, “I have finished the work you have given me to do?”